The truth
by kakapo1
Summary: A number of possible scenarios of how Cheryl finds out about Judd's betrayal with Pascalle. Fits in between episodes 12-16 Series 6. Written before episode 16 aired.
1. Chapter 1

**In this scenario Jethro is the one who tells Cheryl about Judd's betrayal. It is written from Cheryl's POV, and carries on further than the others, with her calling Judd to hear from him if it's true.

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**

Cheryl waited for the guard to open the door for her so she could enter the visitor's room. Every time she went in there, she was torn between elation about seeing one of her loved ones, and despair because they would leave again, and she would stay behind, returning to her cell for the rest of the day, week, month.

She took a deep breath and entered. Jethro was sitting at the table, looking uncomfortable, nervous even. An unusual sight, Cheryl thought.

"Hi love," she said as she kissed him on the cheek.

"Mum", Jethro answered, his hand briefly touching her shoulder. She sat down opposite him, briefly glancing across the room to check out who else was in the visitor's room.

"How are things?"

"Good", Jethro said, avoiding her look. His shoulders were hunched up, his body tense.

"What's going on, Jethro?" Cheryl fixed her eyes on him, studying his face for a moment and noticing that he looked older than usual. "Something's up. You better tell me what's going on." Cheryl had spent enough time inside to know when something was up. She had become very sensitive to her visitor's moods, picking up the slightest vibes.

Jethro shifted in his chair. He shook his head.

"There is something you need to know, Mum", he said. "I wish it wasn't me to tell you. But the person who should tell you is too much of a coward."

He looked into her eyes. Cheryl tried to think of a possible scenario of what Jethro was about to tell her. She couldn't think of anything that would be dramatic enough for him to be talking like this. Was he just being a drama queen to get her attention?

"It's about Judd", he started.

Cheryl felt the blood drain from her face.

"What...has something happened to him?"

Her heart was racing.

"No, he's fine. It's about what he has done", Jethro was squirming.

Cheryl jumped to her feet.

"Don't fuck with me, Jethro, just tell me!"

A guard approached unobtrusively. Cheryl sat down again, her eyes on her son.

"Mum, Judd has betrayed you. He's cheated on you."

Hot flushes of adrenaline flooded Cheryl's body.

"What?"

Jethro took one of her hands.

"Judd's slept with someone... someone you know. He slept with Pascalle."  
A piercing pain entered the back of her head as if someone was pushing a dagger in. It couldn't be true. It was a lie.

"No, he wouldn't", she said. "She wouldn't."

Jethro's eyes told her that it was the truth.

"They did, Mum, they did. I'm so sorry." He grabbed her other hand and squeezed it.

The pain in her head made her sick. She closed her eyes. Everything around her started to spin.

"Mum, I'm sorry. He's a bastard. He doesn't deserve you", Jethro said, clearly at a loss of what to say to her. She stared at him for a while before lifting her hand to her mouth.

"I feel sick", she said. "I need to go."

She stood up, holding on to the chair for a moment before stumbling towards the door.

"Mum...", Jethro said, following her, grabbing her arm.

She turned around, her eyes bewildered and blank at the same time.

"I gotta go, Jethro."

He wanted to pull her into a hug but the guard pushed in between them.

"You need to sit down, sir. You can't follow her."

Cheryl just made it into her cell, covering her mouth but she didn't quite make it to the toilet. Vomit spluttered all over the floor. She held on to the walls of her cell, wretching over the toilet bowl until she felt she could stand no longer. She slid down and ended on the floor, her face covered in cold sweat.

A guard came in with a bucket and a mop.

"Are you okay?"

She ignored him. He shrugged his shoulders and cleaned up her mess. As he left, he pulled Cheryl up by the arm and helped her onto the bed.

She sat without moving, breathing slowly to control the urge to vomit again. A thousand thoughts raced through her head, and the throb in her head returned each time she heard Jethro's voice saying "he slept with Pascalle".

It was so bizarre that if she was an outsider she would laugh out loud at this ridiculous thought. She wanted to scream and yell and cry at the same time. But the threat of being sick again kept her in control. She slowly lowered herself into a horizontal position on her bed, resting her head on the pillow. When she closed her eyes, the stabbing feeling in her head became unbearable, so she opened them again, staring at the picture of him and her on the wall. No sound could express the pain of being ripped apart from inside. The silence in her cell was so profound that anyone who would have entered would have found it eerie.

She dialed his number. Under no circumstances did she want to talk to Pascalle. She wasn't ready to consider that Pascalle may have had anything to do with it. It was bad enough that Judd had betrayed her but the thought that her own daughter was involved was too painful. Thirty minutes ago her life was still manageable, stressful, but under control. It had all changed with a few words.

She was ready to hang up when someone answered the phone.

"Hello?" Hearing his voice brought on a new bout of nausea, and she struggled for a moment to fight the sudden sickness in her stomach.

"Hello?" he said again.

"Tell me that it is a fucking lie", she said, her voice calm and controlled, her insides on the brink of hysteria.

He took a big breath, and she could picture him standing by the kitchen bench, his eyes closed for a minute, his forehead in a frown.

"It isn't. It's true", he said.

The world came crashing down on her. It was too much to bear, ripping her open, exposing her heart, tormenting her soul. She had landed in hell, and the fire was consuming her slowly and painfully to make her suffer more.

She hung up and stared at the floor. Her brain failed to process the flurry of thoughts in her head, and shut down, and for a moment, she experienced a reassuring numbness as if she'd fallen into a pool of cottonwool. But the numbness made it difficult to breathe, the cottonwool around her had swallowed up all the air, and she was left with the remainder, sucking it in desperately.

Then, out of the blue, the numbness disappeared as quickly as it came. Cheryl bent over on her bed, holding her stomach, writhing in pain. There was nothing left but pain and when, finally, a wail broke the eerie silence, it came from the darkest place within her, a sound so chilling that even the most hardened criminal would feel pity with her.


	2. Chapter 2

**This scenario is from Judd's point of view and surprisingly similar to the actual events in episode 16 even though I wrote it a couple of weeks before it aired. Judd's POV.

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**

She looked old. For the first time ever, Judd thought that Cheryl looked old. There was nothing youthful in her looks, the dreary orange jump-suit clashed with her hair and her eyes, and her hollow cheeks hung down from her tired face like wet sheets from a washing line.

"Hey", she smiled at him before sitting down. No kiss, at least, he thought. Anything that made it easier would help.

"Hey", he answered, and just at the precise moment when he looked into her eyes, it hit him how difficult this would be. He had gone over it a thousand times during the many sleepless nights since that fatal night with Pascalle. He had carefully prepared what to say, found reasons that justified his actions, ready to tell her when the time came. And now he was facing her, and it became clear that all his planning had been futile. Nothing could have prepared him for this moment, and he felt stupid that somehow he had expected that there was a magic way which would make this easier.

"How are things?" she asked.

"Good," he answered, shifting in his seat. "You?"

She looked up at him, her eyes resting on him for longer than usual.

"Alright. Just waiting, you know, for the day of the trial. I want to get it behind me so I know what's coming for me. And for you. So you know whether it's worth hanging around or not."

He flinched. Did she know anything?  
"Cheryl, don't say that...", he started.

"No, I have to. 'Cause if I go inside for a long time it won't be worth hanging around for you." Her look remained on him, as if she was waiting to see if his face would give away any clues about what he was thinking. He didn't say anything.  
"I mean, it won't be worth for you hanging around for me." It was a strange thing she had said. As if she wanted him to refute this ridiculous notion of not wanting to wait for her.

Pearls of sweat ran down along Judd's sides. His heart was pounding, he was dying for a glass of water. He couldn't put it off any longer.

"Are you okay?" she asked, taking his hand.

He nodded even though his throat felt tight and he didn't seem to be able to breathe properly. Please let me get through this, he pleaded. He wasn't sure who he was pleading with, but it made him feel slightly more in control. He pulled his hand back.

"Cheryl, there's something I need to tell you", he started.

She leaned back in her chair, her body language showing a defensiveness that he was all too familiar with.

"What?"

"I've done something I should have never is not the right place, but I need to tell you before you hear it from someone else."

He paused, waiting for her to say something. She remained silent. He gasped for air.

"I've had an affair."

There, half of it was out.

She stared at him in bewilderment, her mouth slightly open.

"What?"

"I've had an affair. I betrayed you."

This was the easy part. The other half, the hard part, was yet to come.

She was leaning across the table now, her face hard as stone with lines etched into it.

"Who with?"

Judd closed his eyes for a brief moment.

"Pascalle", he said. "It was Pascalle."

She stared at him for what seemed an eternity. Her face kept changing from a frown to a twitch in her cheek to a narrowing of her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped short.

Judd waited for the explosion. He knew it was coming, it was only a matter of time. The fact that they were in the visitor's area in prison wouldn't make any difference. Cheryl looked straight into his eyes and opened her mouth again.

"You cheated on me with my own daughter?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I did."

She kept her eyes on him, her look a mixture of shock, disgust and despair.

"How could you?" she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "How could you?"

She got up, her chair pushed back, and turned around without another look at him. She approached the door and waited to be let out.

The fact that she hadn't exploded in a fury of words and gestures only made it worse. He could cope with her expressiveness and swearing. At least he knew where he was at when she yelled at him. But this was a different. It was as if he had extinguished something in her. He could see it in her eyes before she had left.


	3. Chapter 3

**This carries on from the same beginning of scenario 2 but instead of retreating, Cheryl goes on the attack. Judd's POV.**

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Judd closed his eyes for a brief moment.

"Pascalle", he said. "It was Pascalle."

She stared at him.

"This is a very sick joke," she said after a while. Her look made him feel soft in the knees and sick in the stomach. It was a pleading look of despair that was clinging onto a thread of hope that this was, in fact, a sick joke. He swallowed hard.

"It isn't. It's the truth."

She flinched.

"You slept with my daughter while I was in prison?" she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

Judd wished he could vanish forever into the concrete floor of the visitor's room.

"Yes, I did. I slept with Pascalle."

Cheryl's eyes narrowed until slits were all that remained of them. She pressed her lips together, and her flaring nostrils were a sign of her level of agitation. It broke his heart to see her struggle for composure when all she wanted was yell at him.

And then, it came.

She jumped up and leaned across the table, her face close to his.

"How dare you fuck my daughter while I'm in here? Are you out of your fucking mind?"

The other inmates and their visitors turned around and stared at her.

"Cheryl...please..."

"Don't you Cheryl please me", she hissed at him.

"You are a fucking bastard and I regret the day I ever got involved with you." She was talking at the top of her voice now. He could see that a guard was approaching but before he managed to get to her, Cheryl had picked up a chair and swung it over her head.

It came crashing down on Judd just as the guard grabbed Cheryl by the arms from behind.

"You're lying piece of scum, you bastard", she yelled, her eyes enraged, as she was pulled back by two men. She screamed and kicked, hurling more abuse at him.

He remained on his plastic chair, rubbing his arm which he had lifted in defense, watching Cheryl as she was led away. Her screams and cries could be heard for a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

**This is not a scenario but a description of what actually happened at the end of episode 16 when Cheryl returns to her cell after Judd told her. One of the most emotional scenes of the whole series and one of my favourites.

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**

Her arms hung down from her side as if they had been stretched and pulled by some heavy machinery, lifeless and limp. She walked down the short corridor and turned into her cell, her eyes sweeping past the mess everywhere - the underwear on the floor, the unmade bunks, the cluttered sink. Cheryl took a moment to take in how everything could be the same when her whole world had just been turned upside down.

In a sudden burst of anger, she smashed her hand into the hairspray and shampoo which were standing on the vanity, sending them flying through the small cell. The pain in her knuckles was nothing compared to the pain which came from the centre of her body and slowly crept up through her chest into her throat and finally, her brain, where the full impact of what had happened sunk in.

She bent over, one hand covering her face, in a vain attempt to keep in control. The pain took hold of her and developed a life of its own, together with the sobs that shook her body. Something gave way inside her, making it impossible to stand upright. She slid down along the wall, covering her face, her head banging against the wall as if it would ease the invisible hurt inside her.


End file.
